If you like board games then there's a good chance you've played some video games at some point - I've lost a fair share of my own existence to these digital delights. And inevitably some video game IPs drift across to the table. There's been some good – I don’t care what people say about Sea of Thieves: Voyage of Legends has gold bags worth of character. Some iffy – Kingdom Rush is initially fun adaptation of the mobile phone games, but fiddliness is its downfall. Some great - the Pac Man board game from the 80's is a thing of beauty.
And here comes another one!
Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game is an epic adventure game mixed with euro elements, set in 15th-century Medieval Bohemia. Over the course of several in-game days and nights, players will try to leave their mark, whether by helping the local nobility, making important connections, fighting enemies, or stealing everything from tiny items to horses. While the game is competitive, it doesn’t pit players against one another, but instead allows them to succeed through their own achievements. It uses a deck-building system and emphasizes player freedom, creating narratives through its mechanics. The game’s open-world nature encourages players to pursue their own goals and shape their stories as they wish.
In Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game, iconic designers Tomáš Holek and Vlaada Chvátil join forces for the first time to bring Warhorse Studios' award-winning Kingdom Come: Deliverance video game to the tabletop in an epic official adaptation.
There'll be plenty of room for hero progression. Develop your character through the decisions you make along the way. Exchange experience for skill cards, allowing you to specialize and prepare for card tests needed to perform main actions. Tests will determine whether you succeed in stealing, fighting, befriending others, hunting, training your skills, or even picking herbs.
There'll be plenty of replayability folded into this open world game as well. Before you even set out, you’ll choose three major storylines—one for each city on the map. Each city offers three different storylines that can be mixed and matched, creating a wide variety of combinations across multiple playthroughs.
What will you get up to as you lunge around the medieval world: help with the wedding preparations, investigate the brutal attack in Neuhof, or race against time before a life-threatening disease wipes out the whole village? The choice is yours, and so are the consequences. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game, no two playthroughs will be the same.
The most successful video-to-table adaptations focus on maintaining the feel or the atmosphere of the original rather than copying the mechanics: this is part of what makes the Kingdom Rush games a chore to bring out of the box after a few plays. It’ll be interesting to see how Kingdom Come: Deliverance fairs on its journey to the tabletop: I had a dabble with it on Xbox Game Pass some time ago and it was certainly immersive but it’s main selling point was the first person combat system. It sounds like this adaptation will lean more into the quest structure to provide the feel of the original, which could be a wise design move.
After some more info/looking forward to finding hideous ways to die in a medieval world? Go here, squire.
About the Author
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here.
